CIRCUS WELT: 75% Sweet – UPDATED

Photo: From left, Joshua Grenrock, John Moskal and Kurt Hargan. Credit: Daniel Cerny

BITTERSWEET
It’s an intriguing idea, as is the decision to launch each of the play’s four acts with chilling 1933 news updates performed as satirical clown routines. But Cerny lacks the production resources and acting talent to bring his vision fully, hauntingly to life.
Daryl H. Miller – LA Times

SWEET
Grenrock makes a touching figure of the put-upon clown who idealizes the shallow Consuelo, Keefer scores as the unhappy lion tamer who perversely wants her lions to love her, and Moskal brings unexpected reality to the role of Papa Bricke. Matthew Morgan provides clever clown choreography, and Shayla Kundera supplies colorful circus costumes. Director Cerny has constructed a neat revision of the script, but the overarching Nazi menace sometimes drowns out the subtleties of Andreyev’s original.
Neal Weaver – Backstage

BITTER
For the playbill, Pavel Cerny pens a detailed history of the Third Reich in the 1930s and how its rise led to the Second World War; naturally he includes Burke’s needlepoint quote about the triumph of evil requiring only that good men do nothing. Mr. Cerny should accept that as dumb as Americans may appear to be at times, we do know these things. We don’t need another didactic portrait of it all. If one intends to trot out the Nazis yet again, it’s best to have something novel to say on the subject. This doesn’t.
Trevor Thomas – EdgeLosAngeles

SWEET
Drama under the “the big top” tent of a circus has never been so interesting as it is in “Circus Welt”, an adapted play from Leonid Andreyev’s “He Who Gets Slapped”. Written, directed and produced by Pavel Cerny, “Circus Welt” becomes a big play in a small theatre, yet you feel the intimacy and claustrophobic presence of being in a difficult and horrid time in history as it affects a group of people in a small traveling circus in Germany during the period of January 1933 to April 1933.
Gwen Hardin – Socal

SWEET
While the remaining vestiges of the original melodrama detract from what could be an extremely compelling piece of theater, Cerny has done his best to minimize them, and his Brechtian-style entr’acte additions, such as the “news clowns,” provide girding for the menacing backdrop of Nazi Germany on the rise.
Mayank Keshaviah – LA Weekly

BITTERSWEET
The script of the play itself is interesting, although the symbolism of exactly why the man chose to be a clown, and specifically one who gets slapped, is almost lost in this adaptation. The specifics of the man who stole his work are there, but seem almost an afterthought. The convention of the gaggle of circus clowns becoming a sort of Greek Chorus is also an interesting one (not new, it was used in Max Frisch’s The Fire Bugs — also a darkly comic look at Nazi Germany — and elsewhere) wherein the clowns relate the current history and events of Germany and the world through darkly humorous interludes in front of the curtain. Also, the political ruminations of the play seem a little painted on to the melodrama of it. Or, perhaps, the melodrama seems painted on to the political aspects.
Geoff Hoff – LA Theatre Review